Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

Spa Treatment: 1942

December 1942. Boxcars being refurbished. "Regular tracks of the South Yards of the Chicago & North Western R.R. Proviso Yard." View full size. 4x5 Kodachrome transparency by Jack Delano for the Office of War Information.

At first I thought these were really refrigerator cars but upon closer inspection they are insulated box cars used for hauling milk. There are no ice hatches on the roofs of the cars either. You can see the word milk on the car in the right corner of the photograph. Its wheel set or "truck" is a beefed up express truck capable of higher speeds then the convention freight car trucks of which we see side frames lined up in the foreground. This was necessary as these cars were usually hauled on passenger trains. These are excellent photographs.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.